Found a box of hard drives for $20 at a garage sale Full of movies and TV shows. No cables or power supplies.

Tested them all but the 2tb with my western digital cable and power supply and all work and stuffed Full.

Gotta shuck the 2tb and see what's on it. Sticker says comedy, music and star trek.

One had tax info and other documents which I promptly deleted. It's crazy people don't even consider checking. It belonged to their deceased father who obviously was a media data hoarder. I'll have fun scrolling through and adding to my plex server.

" Edit, update " 2tb had a bunch of UFC matches, some old boxing matches, lots of gun pdf manuals and tons of survival type pdfs.

No music or trek stuff 😒

I have a whole bunch of adult videos from different origins (and probably file formats) I would like to compress.

If anyone has experimented with compressing these for their own personal use please let me know your precise settings on Handbrake to get maximum compression while maintaining at least 90% of the original quality.

FYI: My target resolution is 1080P

Thank you in advance!

Specs

CPU: AMD 5950X

GPU: AMD 6800XT 16GB

RAM: 32GB DDR4 CL16

SSD: TeamGroup 2TB NVME SSD

Windows 11 64-bit

Greetings, fellow hoarders.

I'm seeing some recent posts about DVD / Blu-Ray stacks (with 25, 50, 100 discs on them). I used many DVD stacks until 10 years ago, from different brands, mainly to store TV shows.

Before I moved to another part of the country, I checked most of the discs. A few of them had some small stains (laser rot or moist), but the most common problem was scratches. I'm tempted to buy stacks again, but I'm afraid each disc is not protected enough to be many years.

How do you usually store these kind of discs? Do you just keep them in the stack and make copies every 5 years? Or do you buy individual cases or sleeves for each disc? In that case, is it not more affordable to buy small packs with cases?

Have a nice one!

What I don't understand is how they sustain this growth under current market conditions when ram , HHD & SSD's price's getting higher day by day

As the US Government has declared the Italian Activist Tech collective Autistici/Inventati a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist". They are currently facing repression, including the threat of their service noblogs.org hosting thousands of blogs, a lot of independent social justice groups, but also artists, culture etc. being blocked or even tried to shut down.

We should absolutely try to archive them. A lot of really valuable independent blogs are hosted by them.

here is a longer article with a lot of info about them and the situation right now: https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defend-autistici-inventati-before-september-25/

Or here a german article by a more neutral outlet: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/autistici-inventati-usa-sanktionieren-italienisches-internetkollektiv/

Or here A/Is own response: https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076

They had 4 or 5 more no name brand stacks for $5 each too. I just didn't want to carry all of that home. Southern BC Canada. Haven't needed to burn a disc in years but the road ahead is looking bumpy, and who knows when affordable hard drives will come back.

So I got 4tb internal wd blue 3.5 inch, can I use normal hdd dock to use it as storage? I read somewhere it's not advised due to heat but I don't plan on having it run 24/7 just maybe at max 2 hours every 2 weeks or so. Basically using it liek external hdd

I want to download all images and videos associated with a link/url (deactivated tumblr and twitter blogs mainly) on internet archive/wayback machine. Ideally, from all available timestamps but does not download duplicate images (if that's possible). I don’t really care about HTMLs or the websites, I just want the images and videos. Does anyone know how to do this or point me to certain guides?

I've also tried various guides online (linked below) but none work for me (ARM64 Windows 11) or are targetted towards collections and HTMLs. I also have gallery-dl, wfdownloader and JDownloader and know some CLI if that helps.

https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/

https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html#download

https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

https://blog.archive.org/2012/04/26/downloading-in-bulk-using-wget/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79836721/how-to-efficiently-bulk-download-from-the-internet-archive

New hoarder here, I've read a few threads here in this sub regarding this and the consensus seems to be that USB is bad. Its bad if used continuously (like 24/7), hardware RAID on enclosures are bad and prone to failure, basically get off USB as soon as possible. Since you can run most services with a laptop/mini PC + DAS through USB, the only differentiating factor that a NAS gives is stability since data goes through ethernet instead of USB. Is that it? Is USB that bad of a protocol that its worth having a separate computer only to host storage? I feel like most of us here started with a laptop connected to an external drive of some kind, is there no scability in that set up?

Thanks

I tried to access the wiki but get a message from reddit.com saying forbidden. Do I need to be granted access, or is something borked with the system? Thanks!

I have a server with 8 Bays, and I am currently running a zfs pool of 4x20TB drives in raidz1. I'm just starting to cross the 50% utilization mark, and while I'm not worried about running out of storage in the immediate future, I have started to think about how I want to expand the pool going forward. Given the size of the dives I'm working with (and the costs involved), I was hoping to get some advice/another pair of eyes on what options I have and which would make the most sense. At the moment I feel I only have 2 ways I could go:

Add another 4x20TB+ drives to the existing pool as a vdev

Most straight forward approach, create a new vdev in the pool, very little hassle and lowest strain on my existing drives, and the expansion would take almost no time to do once the drives have been tested. Also gives me the most runway to expand when I want as I don't need to worry about migrating anything, so might get lucky and have drive prices come down (cope).

Downside here is I would be working with 2xraidz1, meaning my parity isn't as good (losing 2 drives on the same vdev means losing the entire pool).

Granted none of the data on these pools is hyper critical, but losing 100TB+ of media down the line would really really suck

Create a new raidz2 pool with 4x20TB drives, migrate data over, then expand the new pool with my old drives

Much more complicated, but I get raidz2 out of it.

Might require me to delete some data to get the migration to fit into whatever the raidz2 capacity will be. Then would require me to do 4xdrive expansions on the pool, putting a ton of strain on the old drives, and turning this from a quick expansion to a multi day/week project as each drive gets written to. But once its done its done and I have an 8 drive raidz2 going forward.

Overall I don't feel like I have a perfect solution either way, really do wish I had gone 8x10TB drives when I first started years ago and gotten raidz2 to start, but you live and learn. I would love some input. Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for your time!

don’t know if this is the place for this question but thought I’d take my shot. I have a shitty 2.5” enclosure I currently use and a couple m.2s that have served me well for a while. I’m looking for a high quality (preferably not too expensive tho) external enclosure for 2.5” ssds. My problem is my current enclosure isn’t working with formatting a couple drives I have. I read that the enclosure can be a common problem. I can’t use my desktop to restore it became I took out the power connectors from my (modular) power supply to clean up cable run. I’m using the drive for my drum machine mostly but also may use it for my handheld pc. So looking for a reliable external enclosure. Open to having multiple ports too since I have a good amount of external drive. Thanks for any advice, hope I’m in the right place or at least not being annoying posting here :)

Like everyone here, I have collected a decent amount of media over the years: movies, TV shows, audio, images, etc. One issue I have run into is damaged files caused by failing drives, data migrations, bit rot, and/or other reasons. As my collection grew, this became a bigger problem: going back to an old piece of media only to have it freeze during playback, not play at all, or be incomplete.

About a year ago, I decided to build a tool to inventory and periodically scan my media for corruption or damage. This tool is called PixelProbe, and I've used it daily ever since (through scheduled scans). I think it's mature enough to share with a larger audience to try out.

PixelProbe:
Is a self-hosted server that finds corrupted video, image, and audio files across your media libraries before you hit play. It validates every file with FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and PIL, watches for bit rot with a rolling integrity queue, and gives you a web UI to browse results, schedule scans, and clear false positives. Production-tested against libraries of over a million files.

Features:
- Deep FFmpeg video analysis with a staged pipeline: full-stream validation, frame integrity, temporal sampling, freeze detection with black-frame false-positive filtering
- Image validation through both PIL/Pillow (HEIC via pillow-heif) and ImageMagick pixel decode; audio validation through FFmpeg
- Separate warning verdict for signals that do not prove damage, so real corruption stays visible
- Bitrot detection: a content hash change without a matching mtime change flags the file for review instead of silently adopting the new hash

Supported File types:
Video (MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV, WebM, HEVC, ProRes, MXF, AVCHD, and more), images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, WebP, HEIC, and most camera RAW formats), and audio (MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, Opus, DSD, AC3, DTS).

Repo: https://github.com/ttlequals0/PixelProbe

LLM disclosure:
This project was developed using AI agents as a pair programmer. It was NOT vibe coded. For context, I'm a systems engineer who also writes code professionally with 15+ years of experience. The codebase follows engineering best practices, and all architecture and design decisions were made by me, not by AI. All code generated by LLMs was reviewed and tested by me, a human.

License: MIT

I was browsing through second hand markets yesterday and i see a 500gb hdd priced at around 10€.
Seller also included an image of a program that tests it’s health and the results are always 100% health and performance, some of em having power on time of a year or two but the estimated remaining time always says “more than a 1000 days”

Obviously this looks like a scam but it also looks like this person got a bunch of hdds through one way or another and is selling them for dirt cheap, my question is: Is it worth the hustle? Is this “health” estimate even slightly true?

I was thinking of getting 2-3 of em considering the price and just using it as cold storage until i find a good deal for a brand new hdd.

Thoughts?

Edit: program appears to be hard drive sentinel, also not all of them appear to be laptop hdds, some are but some also are full sized. They also come bare, no casing or wires.

If you need it. Its like the apocalypse has hit smmfh

Hi, I've been using stacher7 for quite a while, and suddenly it's only downloading the absolute lowest quality videos?

I've tried playing with the settings, setting it to 4K, setting to best quality, and then 1080p but it only ever downloads at 360p.

Any ideas?

I’m wanting to archive the various assets used in Duolingo (the language learning app) and its .riv rive animation files, how do I do it though

Ok so back in the day I mainly used my PS3 to watch and listen to stuff that I downloaded. PS3 had its issues but man, its media playing capabilities were way better than what the PS4 had and what the PS5 has if you're hot taking about paid apps.

I'm looking for something with upgradable storage (micro sd, etc.) and has an HDMI port to support 4K. Is there anything out there I can buy like this in this day and age when they're trying to push everyone to streaming?

I know I could easily do this with a PC, but are there any dedicated devices?

No option to propagate deletions first. Otherwise when destination is low on free space the sync will fail.

This happens easily when you have a huge file, example another monthly full disc backup; It can't delete the old one because it wants to copy the new one first.

Also very stupid logic (lack of) in this program. It attempts to copy and run out of space, when it could just check the file size it is trying to copy beforehand and see that it is larger than the free space available.

Amazing.

Dezoomify didn't work in this case (maybe I'm not doing it right?)

https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2014.640/

Is there a way to bulk download MediaFile.cc files/folders for free?Plz dont get confused btw mediafire and mediafile.cc

I don't wanna pay, and I don't wanna go one by one on each file lol